because C128 / C128D, C16 and even Vic-20 were all Commadore compatible.

But not with each other.

bobsobol:

The Amiga was originally developed by Amiga Inc. and Amiga Inc. was sold to Escom and eventually became an independent organisation again, which still exists today. (they make and sell AmigaOne and Amiga OS 4)

Gateway license the Amiga IP and patents until their expiry to a newly formed Amiga Inc subsidiary

Gateway shutters Amiga Inc

Amiga Inc sold to Amino Development

Amino Development renamed Amiga Inc

Amiga Inc sell the copyrights and trademarks to Cloanto and license the AmigaOS to Hyperion Entertainment

... and AROS, MorphOS and some legal disputes and insolvency scares aside, that's how things sit at the moment. So the Amiga Inc. you're referring to is quite far removed from that original bunch of hardware hackers in Santa Clara.

Through one method or another (there is conflicting historical evidence, depending who you ask) the original Amiga Inc. was almost split between Commadore and Atari after the original / prototype A1000 was being shrunk into an all-in-one, and they needed funding to get it where it deserved to be. The A500 (the result of that) looked like it would be an Atari, but they didn't want to buy the company, just the machine. I think they did end up with a couple of the key staff before Commadore took them on as a whole, and made the actual A500.

Not sure where you're getting this from [citation needed], but the well-known history of the Amiga starts with Jay Miner (ex-Atari) hooking up with Larry Kaplan (ex-Atari) to form Hi-Toro in 1982, where the Lorraine, later Amiga, would be developed. They changed the name of the company to Amiga Incorporated the same year. By 1984 they had some kick-ass hardware, but no large company to fund and incubate the system into a final product.

Eventually, Atari loaned Amiga half a million dollars for thirty days as an effective down payment to keep Amiga alive against a future stock and IP deal, but Atari were really only interested in the Agnes + Denise + Paula chipset, which led Jay Miner and co to start looking at alternative funding, as they couldn't really afford to pay the loan back . At the same time, Jack Tramiel left Commodore, taking engineering employees with him, and proceeded to buy out Atari from Warner Bros, finds the Atari/Amiga deal, and sued the shit out of Amiga.

Commodore were really the white knight at this point, seeing the potential not only in the chipset but in the Amiga team as well, paying off the Atari loan and purchasing Amiga Incorporated. Commodore renamed the company Commodore Amiga Incorporated, funneled cash into the now-subsidiary company to further develop the Amiga chipset and computer, and this led to the development of what became the Amiga 1000.

The "all-in-one" model, the Amiga 500, wasn't released until almost two years later, in 1987, and in fact the Amiga 2000 was released two months before the 500.

This is a pretty well told tale, and I'm not sure where your alternate take comes from.

bobsobol:

The point is, while the custom chip thing looks like a Commadore idea, it was actually more closely related to Sega / Atari 2800 type systems, and the PAD coppers existed in the A1000 before Commadore had anything to do with the machine, or the company that designed it.

The 2600 does owe some debt to Jay Miner, but not in it's design, just in it's final implementation. He was definitely responsible for the 400 and 800 at Atari.

But without Commodore, the Amiga would be a small footnote in history, a chipset designed for Atari, by some ex-Atari guys, which Atari then didn't want.

bobsobol:

It's not really a Commadore, we just have to thank them for making it economically viable without breaking up the company and team the way Atari wanted.

Well, yeah. But not really.

bobsobol:

Perhaps, you should think of it like you wouldn't consider your Specturm +3 to be an Amstrad. It's not a CPC, and not a PCW, Amstrad did very little besides put a decent keyboard on it and build a 3" disc drive into it.

I do consider my +3 to be an Amstrad. For one thing, it says "(c) Amstrad" whenever you switch it on. It has the same form factor as the CPC. It used a 3" FDD because Amstrad had bought so bloody many drives and disks for the CPC and the Joyce (PCW). It also, rather tellingly, has a massive AMSTRAD logo on the circuit board (twice!).

The Sam Coupé is still a beautiful, low power computer, with a very mature (obviously) Basic programming language in ROM. With the Sinclair symbolic memory footprint, which precursors things like Java byte-code, and MSIL, Spectrum resolution without colour attributes and a 16 colours on screen, (or twice that in 4 colours, for WP/DTP) from a palette of 4096 colours, and semi-Amiga style HAM capabilities and hardware blitting all available from Basic.

Stop it, you're making me drool! I remember lusting over the Coupé brochure after the Sinclair Loki was revealed to be complete vapourware. I've still never seen a Coupé in the flesh.

bobsobol:

but I think the true continuation of Sinclair was the Russian clones, Scorpion and Pentagon.

The first computer that was actually mine was a cobbled together Pentium II that I loved dearly. However before that I used various Windows PCs back to about 3.1. I also spent a lot of time on a friend's Amiga 500 (presumably - might have been a different model). It was powered by alien technology compared to the Windows machine I used at home.

At school we had some variety of Acorn, presumably Archimedes. I recall being taught to use Logo for a brief period and being baffled as to why. We also had some other, older computers in various classrooms. I recall using a BBC Micro but the other machines I'm not so sure on. Power-wise I feel like it was between an Archimedes and a BBC Micro but who can say what it was? I recall playing some medieval-themed game on it briefly that had an arm-wrestling minigame. Any takers on what that was?

In general though I feel like the whole programming initiative passed me by. It wasn't long before teachers were trying to teach me the rudiments of Microsoft Office and little else.

You guys are old. My first computer came with a Pentium P5 processor, 8MBs of EDO RAM (later upgraded to 40MBs), and Windows 95. We bought it in 1996 with an amazing 14 (or maybe it was 13) inch color monitor. The machine was epic, it worked better than a tractor, although the Windows crashes were not fun. I think it's still somewhere in storage at home, my mom kept using it up until very recently because of attachment issues.

4th here (CPC464, Atari STe, 386DX40, then P100). Funnily enough it was an Escom one as mentioned in the Amiga story.Biggest heap of turd ever, that exercised the W95 bluescreen code excessively.Glad they went bust.Fixed by binning the 100MHz mobo/CPU and replacing with a Pentium 233MHz, which was my first ever online purchase.

The computer we had at home when I was a kid was a Commodore Amiga 500. At school we had Acorn Archimedes (around one in each classroom in primary school, separate computer rooms in secondary school).
I also had a friend with some PCs, mainly running OS/2 but also DOS and Windows 3.1.

When I was about 13 it all moved to Windows PCs, then I first installed Linux at around 16.

Fixed by binning the 100MHz mobo/CPU and replacing with a Pentium 233MHz, which was my first ever online purchase.

Mine (1st fully online buy) was in 1998.

A friend of my Dad’s is after some old Spectrum hardware, for nostalgia I think. Not sure which/how much of mine I am ready to part with, and at least one +2 has non-working sound due my attempts to give it stereo via the home-brew ACB system someone came up with.